Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/762

754 Mr. Buchanan knows—we believe better than any man in the country—that the Lecompton Constitution is not the act of the people of Kansas. By the election of the 4th of January—an election which was perfectly valid, because it was held under the authority of a Territorial Legislature superior to the Convention—it was solemnly and unequivocally condemned. This of itself was enough to demonstrate that fact. But all the Democratic Governors of the Territory with the single exception of Shannon, and the recently appointed acting Governor, Denver, who is prudently silent—testify urgently to the same truth. Reeder, Geary, and Walker, together with the late acting Governor, Stanton, asseverate, in the most earnest and emphatic manner, that the majority in Kansas is for making it a Free State,—that the minority which has ruled is a factious minority, and that they have obtained and perpetuated their ascendency by a most unblushing series of crimes and frauds. Yet, in the teeth of this evidence, — of repeated elections,—of his own witnesses turning against him, — the President adheres to the infamous plans of the pro-slavery leaders; and, if not arrested by the rebukes of the North, he will insist on imposing their odious measures upon their long-suffering victims.

Looking at the administration of Mr. Buchanan simply from the point of view of an enlightened statesmanship, we find nothing in it that is not contemptible; but when we regard it as the accredited exponent of the moral sense of a majority of our people, it is saved from contempt, indeed, but saved only because contempt is merged in a deeper feeling of humiliation and apprehension. Unparalleled as the outrages in Kansas have been, we regard them as insignificant in comparison with the deadlier fact that the Chief Magistrate of the Republic should strive to defend them by the small wiles of a village attorney,—that, when the honor of a nation and the principle of self-government are at stake, he should show himself unconscious of a higher judicature or a nobler style of pleading than those which would serve for a case of petty larceny, — and that he should be abetted by more than half the national representatives, while he brings down a case of public conscience to the moral level of those who are content with the maculate safety which they owe to a flaw in an indictment, or with the clingy innocence which is certified to by the disagreement of a jury.

These things are the logical consequences of that profound national demoralization which followed the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Bill and alone made its execution possible, — a demoralization wilfully brought about, for selfish ends, in that sad time which saw our greatest advocates and our acutest politicians spending all their energy of mind and subtlety of argument to persuade the people that there was no higher law than that rule of custom and chicane woven of the split hairs of immemorial sophistry, and whose strongest fibre is at the mercy of an obstinate traverse juror, — no law higher than the decree of party, ratified by a popular majority achieved by the waiters on Presidential providence, through immigrant voters whom the gurgling oratory of the whiskey-barrel is potent to convince, and whose sole notion of jurisprudence is based upon experience of the comparative toughness of Celtic skulls and blackthorn shilalahs. And such arguments were listened to, such advocates commended for patriotism, in a land from whose thirty thousand pulpits God and Christ are preached weekly to hearers who profess belief in the Divine government of the world and the irreversible verdicts of conscience!

The capacity of the English race for self-government is measured by their regard as well for the forms as the essence of law. A race conservative beyond all others of what is established, averse beyond all others to the heroic remedy of forcible revolution, they have yet three